he adds, "makes all the difference between slavery and freedom, between misery and happiness." We sometimes hear the fear expressed that the new methods make education too easy. It is true that for the best results oft-repeated and severe exertion is necessary, but it is never necessary that this exertion be made without motive. Hard work is necessary, but should it ever be done without interest and a pleasurable sense of reward? "The time of interest is the time of opportunity." There can be no excuse for making things dull or difficult that may be made easy and attractive. The child must be dealt with sincerely, naturally. We do not expect success by finding the longest way instead of the shortest, the slowest instead of the quickest, the hardest instead of the easiest. The common-sense of the busy and prosperous life of the farm, the store, and the street is just what is needed in the schoolroom. Good teachers will soon cease to believe that some studies are good for discipline that are not good for anything else. The best discipline is and must be found in doing something worth doing, and doing it well. Life is a unity and is continuous from the cradle to the grave. The school is not to be viewed merely as a preparation for life, but as a very important part of it. Those interests should be begun, those methods started, those purposes planted that are to characterize the life thruout.

If this be true, how important it is that we scrutinize very carefully the usages, employments, and methods of the school, lest haply we find that we have wasted time and dissipated energy and acted very foolishly in dealing with children!

The end or goal. It is now more evident than ever before that the true aim of education is not knowledge merely, or chiefly, but a manysided development. Child study has helped us most by enhancing our value of the product of our work. This is nothing less than skill of hand and eye and tongue, a well-poised body, a well-rounded mind, a sympathetic and altruistic nature, strong and worthy interests, force of will, and power to do.

Knowledge is not the end. Tho the pupil have all knowledge, and have not interest and motive, it profits him nothing. To what, then, shall we appeal in education? To the needs of the individual child. There is but one rule that will never fail us, and that is, study and serve each child. Everything else must be secondary to this. School is but a contrivance to help the child. The rigidity of the curriculum and the school routine must yield somehow to the needs of the individual child, or it would in many cases be better to take the child out of school. By far the richest fruit of the whole child-study movement is the greatly increased interest in the child to be educated.

The Great Teacher said, "Consider the lilies of the field how they grow." In education we have at last happily reached the stage when many teachers really "consider" the child.

as well

Child study seems destined, not to modify merely, but to revolutionize, our methods of discipline. The teacher who punishes the child in ignorance of physical infirmities and home deficiencies is inexcusable, and the teacher who does so with a knowledge of, but without allowance for, these things, is cruel and brutal. No hand is fit to touch young life in the schoolroom except the hand of skill and kindness. Almost employ an eighteen year-old girl without special training to fill prescriptions in a drug store as to employ her without training or preparation to teach children. The demand should be instant, constant, persistent that only well-trained teachers shall be put in charge of schools. Child-study has emphasized this demand as no other educational movement has done or could do.

In spite of all that child study has accomplished, a recent writer says: “There are some healthful signs that the child-study diversion which has been carried to such extremes has well-nigh run its course." In my judg ment the most hopeful sign for the future of elementary education is that child study has only begun its course.

DISCUSSION

JOHN DEWEY, professor of philosophy and education, University of Chicago. — I would emphasise, first, the last statement in Professor Noss' paper. The chief thing child study has done is that it has regenerated the peculiar thing named "pedagogy and psychology for teachers," a great deal that formerly went by this name being very remote. The first pedagogical doctrine, "from the concrete to the abstract," was often disregarded by pedagogs themselves. The concrete for the teacher is the mind of the child, not mind in general, but a particular mind, a particular spirit in an individual child. Child study has led us to base methods on the actual characteristics of the actual concrete being under instruction. Classifications used to be laid down of the various faculties of the mind: memory, imagination, reasoning, and rules given for training each. There was smooth sailing when these were considered only theoretically; but when the rules were applied to children it was discovered that the latter were not faculties, but live beings. A person from Mars might study purely theoretical pedagogy, and still not be able to identify a human being. Analysis is carried so far that it would not put one in touch with faculties when bound together in a human being. Independent of some exaggeration about particular truths discovered by child study, it has served to put emphasis in training a child upon the right basis. The teacher who really knows the subject to be taught and the nature of the individual mind which is dealt with can develop his own devices with better results than he could attain by learning particular recipes having not much to do with the child. Child study has put into proper perspective the sort of training which the teacher needs, and has brought a vitalizing element into the work. We teachers are the most conscientious class in the world; often too conscientious in following types of pedagogical recommendations which bring no adequate return. Child study vitalizes the truths grasped after.

Child study has brought about a different conception of education itself. One of the late advances in education was the doctrine of drawing out instead of pouring in. But the thing drawn out was expected to be knowledge, as tho the child had swallowed the world, and methods must be applied to draw out of him what he has swallowed. Conceive little children in the home or at play. They don't sit around waiting to have

things drawn out, but are all activity, full of intensity, zeal, restlessness. Child study makes prominent the activities of the child and tries to find the line along which these activities can direct themselves.

Child study brings out the significance of development in education. We have always talked about this, comparing the child to the acorn, but it has been treated in a poetical rather than a scientific way. We recognize particular characteristics which are prominent at different periods of growth, and which must be treated in different ways. Child study has done much in bringing out the defining and leading characteristics of different epochs. Biologists talk about a culture medium. According to different media they get different results in lower and even in higher forms of life; and this control of the nature of living things is as scientific as the action of machinery. The skill of the horticulturist in transforming grains and fruits is not guess-work or haphazard, for he knows the conditions necessary for such transformation. There is certainty that this can ultimately be done in human development when conditions for growth are better known. To say that there are laws governing the movement of planets, laws of chemistry, metals, etc., and that mind has no laws of its own to be made use of, is absurd.

To ridicule child study, which has its excresences, is to say that mind has no laws which can be discovered. The time will come when one of the two or three important facts which educational history will mention about this period will be its recognition that the embodied mind of boys and girls has laws which can be discovered, and the laws discovered give a basis for directing a growth which will give the richest and best results.

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD AS APPLIED TO

EDUCATION

R. O. BEARD, M.D., PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA The literature of education is rich in its elaboration of the methods of instruction and in its discussion of the tools of teaching. It is poor still, and that despite some recent valuable contributions to its treasury of knowledge in the study of the human being to be taught. As in the library, so in the schools. The teacher is trained in the technique of his task, in the use of his implements, in the subject-matter of the multiplicity of themes he is to teach. He learns little of the physiology of the child with whose physiologic development he is charged.

The true musician is he who knows not only the science of harmony, the theory of composition, the technique by which his musical conception is to find expression in instrumental or vocal form, but he who is familiar with the structure of the instrument by which his creations are to be actualized. It is a master hand guided by a master mind which touches to our finest sense the keys which utter his musical message to mankind. But it is too often an unskilled hand which fumbles with roughly shapen fingers, an unawakened eye which scans the unmeaning measures, an unknowing mind which seeks to stir the sweetness of this harp of a thousand strings, to awaken the harmonies of the human mind in which the music of a myriad years is massed.

Child study, it is true, is a recognized obligation of the teacher of today, but child study has been pursued almost exclusively from the metaphysical viewpoint, and has, so far, been based but little upon the physiology of the young human body, of which the mental is the highest, but not the only, nor in any sense an independent, form of functional activity. The subject has been obscured by the pursuance of technical details of mental peculiarity, instead of being illumined by the liberal study of the broad principles upon which the physiology of childhood rests. The consequence is that modern education is, in its results, a departure from the ancient ideals which we, far better than the ancients, with far greater possibilities of knowledge than they possessed, have the opportunity to attain the culture of a mens sana in corpore sano. The consequence, to put it in positive terms, is too frequently seen by the physician in an unfortunate tendency to the asymmetrical development of children.

In order to lay down some lines along which the scientific study of the child should be pursued, certain foundational principles in the physiology of childhood may be profitably suggested. Child study, to be safely informing, must carry the student teacher back not only to the beginnings of infant life, but to an inquiry into those hereditary forces which so frequently and so deeply determine character. He cannot safely content himself with the attempt to discover the physiologic conditions of the child of school age. The teacher deals with fortunately plastic but nevertheless partially formed plasm. Development is, and education therefore must be, continuous, both in the individual and in the race. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes predicted his failure to correct the physical errors of a child because he had not had the opportunity to begin with his patient's grandmother. While the teacher is required to build upon foundations which are already partially laid, his knowledge of the ideal substructure of the human edifice will ultimately improve the building in the home, as well as the building in the schoolroom. The teacher is the most permanent of all builders, because that which he builds in the childhood of today tends to establish the type of the building of the generations which are to follow. He is a most potent factor in the evolution of the future, since that structural impress which he has years of opportunity to make upon the human organism fosters the hope of heredity. Without that structural change transmission fails. And this emphasizes the important consideration that he has to deal with a thing which is still in the making-in the making in a very essential physiologic sense.

Growth is the dominant characteristic of childhood, and one which is conditioned not only upon its rapidity, but upon its specific quality. Differentiation of structure and specialization of function are going on hand in hand, and that, particularly at this period, in the nerve tissues. It becomes the task of the teacher to foster the symmetrical development of

the child both structurally and functionally. His aim is, or ought to be, the production of a perfect whole.

This burden of growth which childhood carries constitutes a heavy nutritive demand upon it. This demand is met by the large development in early life of the tissue-elaborating organs. They represent a very large percentage of the body weight of the child. Their functional operation requires an equally wide range. It must not be narrowed by the intrusion of other forms of functional activity of less immediate consequence. The need of tissue-building material in childhood is correspondingly large, and it should be remembered that this structural material includes water and oxygen in very generous measure. Teachers and school officials do not sufficiently appreciate the physiologic need of large quantities of pure air and pure water by the children during long school hours.

The process of digestion in the child, however advantageously simple the dietary may be, is relatively slow, and temporarily taxes the blood supply. It should not be embarrassed by an undue draft upon the circulation for the purposes of cerebral activity. For the school-going child the morning meal should be early; the noon meal light; an early evening meal staple. The school tasks with which morning and afternoon sessions begin should be easy, in order to allow time for the completion of digestion. The more difficult studies should be reserved for the intervals following recess. Seasonal variations in growth, particularly emphasized in the spring and autumn, should be respected.

In childhood, time is emphatically of the essence of function. The fund of potential energy stored by the tissue-cells is not large and it is rapidly expended. The periods of functional activity are therefore brief. The demand for repose is emphatic. Sleep is the period alike of construction and reconstruction. The more actively growth and repair are associated, the longer must be the interval of rest. Sleep is the overseer of the tissue-building process. To be effective, functional activity must be minimized; relaxation must be complete. Sleep-tension, a condition frequently observed in the overtaxed child, is a practical insomnia. It is a signal of nerve storm.

Not only is the range of physiologic activity in childhood a narrow one, but the pendulum of function is easily swung. Elasticity is alike a structural and a functional quality. It is illustrated at almost every point, in the wide and readily provoked variance in the caliber of the arteries; in the frequency and changing force of the heart-beat; in the rapid and deeper rhythm of respiration; in the sharp contraction and perfect reaction of the skeletal muscles; in the ready rise and fall of the temperature scale; in the quick response and the equally quick exhaustion of the nervous mechanism.

Valuable as this elastic quality is, it marks a tendency to extremes of which the educator must beware.